Sunday 9 March 2014 15.35 EDT
First published on Sunday 9 March 2014 15.35 EDT

Some thought they were hearing Hugh Grant in Love Actually, but perhaps another influence was Elizabeth Barrett Browning. "How do I love thee?" she asked in a famous poem. "Let me count the ways." On Sunday Nick Clegg offered his party's spring conference – and beyond it, the wider electorate – a list of 16 or 17 ways, depending on how you count, in which he Loved Britain, invoking such different British enthusiasms as human rights and gay marriage, the NHS and the shipping forecast, royal babies and Private Eye.

Like all such speeches, it required some bashing of Labour and the Conservatives, but his sights were also plainly set on a certain unnamed Mr Farage. Mr Clegg wants us to know that, as a patriot, he stands for what he defines as a moderate, open, tolerant Britain – where Ukip by implication stands for a swath of opinion that believes that moderation and tolerance need to be reined back; a priority that may well reflect the findings in the morning's Sunday Times poll, which had Ukip on 14% of the vote and the Lib Dems behind on 10%.

How seriously should we take the rise of Ukip since Mr Farage took over? A book that examines the party's nature, Revolt on the Right: Explaining Public Support for the Radical Right in Britain, by political scientists Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford, comes out this week: the Guardian ran a piece based on it last Thursday. Some readers doubt if Ukip is worth such attention. There's a history of political parties that blossom, but fade away when the pressure is on. It didn't take long for even the SDP to cease to look like the future and begin to look like the past. New parties may especially flourish in contests where turnouts are low, because their supporters alone are highly motivated. Always look at the share a party takes of the total electorate as well as its share of the poll. Even Ukip's eye-catching 24% of the vote at the South Shields byelection last year was built on the backing of a mere 9.5% of the electorate.

Yet even new-party sceptics need to pay heed to the nature of their support, as analysed in this book. It's too easy to suppose that Ukip is essentially a refuge for discontented Conservatives, desperate for their party to get tougher on Europe, tougher on immigration, and tougher on most other things too. But what it preaches echoes the mood of former Labour voters as well. Ukip under Mr Farage has established itself as the voice of the dispossessed: people who sense that their neighbourhoods, their cultures, their country, have been stolen from them. "They feel," these authors say, "like strangers in a society whose ruling elites do not talk like them, or value the things that matter to them."

Immigration is the obvious scapegoat, as it has always been for people who feel that way. But in relative strongholds such as Lincolnshire – far away from the centre of events, and far away also from the benefits of an economic recovery that is skewed towards London and the south-east – the conviction that the country is being run overwhelmingly in the interests of the comfortable classes of the capital and its hinterland is a powerful ingredient too.

Free from the fear of having one day to practise what he's been preaching, Mr Farage articulates what they feel, and is consequently judged to be honest in a way that mainstream politicians are not. Where Mr Clegg is keen to enshrine the Liberal Democrats as a party of government, for many of the dispossessed, a "party of government" defines precisely what they are most against.

The fundamental instincts of Ukip supporters, as set out by Mr Goodwin and Mr Ford, will have little appeal for Guardian readers. But a moderate, open and tolerant Britain ought to acknowledge that the fears and discontents of these dispossessed deserve to be given a hearing. Better to have them investing in their own way in the broad democratic process than joining the ranks of that steadily growing political grouping, the Why Bothers, also known as the Will Not Votes.